BIG SCREEN
QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2 SPUDS)

DVDS
THE VISITOR (2 SPUDS)
THE X-FILES – I WANT TO BELIEVE (ONE SPUD)
KUNG FU PANDA (1.5 SPUDS)

TV
DIRT (2 XL SPUDS)
24 REDEMPTION (1.5 SPUDS)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

Well here we are in the crappy wet late November/early December weather. I shouldn’t complain though. Last year at this time it was pretty much a non-stop snow shoveling extravaganza, with one member of the Spud Central shoveling tandem down for the count. This year, we’re all ‘bring it on’, cause between the two of us, we can make short work of whatever blows our way. We have also just equipped the hybrid Spudmobile with snow tires, which is a first for me. BTW, if you have to do the same, it’s Canadian Tire all the way, from a cost perspective for both tires and installation.

Tomorrow, as I write this, is the US thanksgiving. And the day following it, is fondly, and in this economy, paradoxically known as Black Friday, which is the biggest shopping day of the year. Last night we were watching NCIS and The Mentalist (both 2 Spud shows), and the a lot of commercials that were coming on were for retailers who were encouraging their customers to get up at 4:00 am to start their Black Friday shopping. 4:00 freaking a.m.! Now I don’t know what marketing Einstein came up with that particular ploy, but it really says a lot as about the United States of American in a couple of ways. One is that they have figured out a way to extend the shopping day in a way that doesn’t intrude on leftover turkey dinner. And two, they know that if they put it on TV and yell at the people loud enough that an astonishingly high number of people will show up, like lemmings at the cliffside to do their bit to stimulate the economy and get their mandatory shopping done.

I’ve always liked a lot of things about Christmas, but one of the things I dislike about it, especially as an empty nester living in a bungalow is getting stuff for Christmas that I have to find a place for. I simply don’t have that much free space here at Spud Central. When I finish reading a paperback, I call the kids to see if they want it or immediately put it in a bag to go to the used book store. If someone where to give me a framed print or photograph, good luck with that, cause there’s simply no free wall space. Now, a lot of people, especially in the immediate tribe understand that which is good. So I end up with things like a subscription to ESPN magazine, or a piece of replacement communications technology. After that the list of things I’d like to have for Christmas falls off dramatically. Not because I am any sort of curmudgeon about it. But simply because I pretty much have everything I want or need. And if I think back, I pretty much always have. I’m one damn lucky spud.

No…what I like about Christmas is all the traditional stuff. Fluffy snowfalls that make the shoveling more fun than drudgery. Old movies. The smells that fill the kitchen when the Wife is whipping up her famous Christmas treats. The college football bowl games. Yonge Street between Queen and Bloor. Egg nog with a little whiskey or rum in it and a sprinkle of nutmeg on it. The dinner table, with its bright red tartan table cloth. Singing Christmas carols to myself. The fact that my immediate tribe is close by and always here on Christmas day. The time off to just muse a bit, rest a lot and make plans for the upcoming year. A walk on the boardwalk in a snowstorm.  All this stuff is really precious to me, and the best part of all is that none of it involves getting up at 4:00 in the morning and standing in line like an arsehole at some department store.

BIG SCREEN

QUANTUM OF SOLACE (2 SPUDS)

This is the second 007 pic with Daniel Craig in the James Bond role, and it pretty much cements his rep as the greatest Bond of all, if your criteria for judging that is authenticity.
This has a lot to do with writer Paul Haggis, who seems to have taken the franchise back to its roots and brought the Bond character much more in line with the original character created in the famous Bond novels by Ian Fleming. Craig’s Bond is an outsider, a sociopath weapon, used by British intelligence to do nasty stuff for which they pretend to chastise him for this behaviour, which, of course, gets them off the hook politically. In other words, he goes into every assignment as a rogue agent, and knows how to act the part.

This flick kind of picks up on the heels of the last one, as there is enough overlapping in the story line to give us a time perspective. This time the enemy is another wealthy industrialist
environmentalist who is seeking to control the water supply of South America. He is, like all Bond villains, a nasty piece of work, every bit as sociopathic as Bond.

This film was directed by Marc Forster who seems right at home here in the action genre, even though most of his previous films have been anything but action adventures. (Stranger Than Fiction, The Kite Runner and Finding Neverland, all 2 Spuds flicks). But hey, when you have a couple of hundred million to blow and you’re good at what you do, any given director would probably kill a few people, even a close friend, for the crack at it.

As I said before, I don’t go the movies very much, since Spud Central is so well equipped to provide me with all the pluses of the theatrical experience and hardly none of the minuses. But as the Wife says, there are certain movies that need to be seen on the big screen. And Quantum of Solace (sorry, have no clue what it means), is one of them.

DVD QUICKIES

KUNG FU PANDA (1.5 SPUDS)

The Boy recommended this Dreamworks animated feature to us. Said it was hilarious. OK. Well it just goes to illustrate the ‘different strokes for different folks’ adage. I enjoyed it and found it funny and inventive in parts. It’s really beautifully drawn. But for me, hilarity did not ensue. For the Wife, this viewing experience was encapsulated in three words , ‘waste of time’. Now admittedly, she’s not a big fan of animation. In fact, she’s not a fan at all.  Bottom line – Not bad…not great. Well made.

THE X-FILES—I WANT TO BELIEVE (1 SPUD)

OK. The first x-Files movie was great. Big theme. Fit into the X-Files mold like a glove. Introduced Mulder’s sister who he spent 10 years on TV trying to find, and was generally pretty cool to watch. This one is the exact opposite. It felt more like an bad episode of Criminal Minds. It was pretty small and made for TV like for a big time Hollywood franchise sequel. This leads me to believe that creator/producer/director Chris Carter, has pretty much run out of gas, as far as this concept goes and would be well advised to go find a new toy to play with.

In this installment Mulder and Scully are living together. Mulder gets so excited about having something to do other than clip newspaper articles that he shaves his beard. Scully is all worried about some kind in her hospital with brain disease. And Russian maniac is trying to build a Frankenstein. The great Billy Connelly is completely wasted as a child molesting defrocked RC priest and psychic.  There are a lot of disparate elements that make up this movie that never seem to come together and add up to anything. But then that’s a symptom of being out of gas, which I happen to believe Mr Carter is.

THE VISITOR (2 SPUDS)

This is a nice tidy and slightly sad little indie flick about a widowed professor at an upstate New York college who finds a Syrian musician and his Senegalese girlfriend living in his New York city apartment when he comes down for a conference. This movie is wonderfully put together with great sparse performances bay everybody including Richard Jenkins and Haaz Sleiman, who have great chemistry together. This movie is about the redemption of the soul and it makes its point loud and clear without being brassy or forced. This is the kind of film you just want to sit on your couch and watch. It’s quite moving and understated, and because of those qualities, very powerful. I liked this film a lot.

TV

DIRT (2 SPUDS)

The Boy came over one day with a bunch of DVDs that he thought we might be interested in, including the FX Network series, Dirt. This is a series that you have probably never heard of. It stars Courtney Cox (one of the most incredible looking babes ever on TV) as the editor of a Hollywood tabloid weekly called Dirt.  This series gives you a real inside look that this smarmy business, and all the blackmailing, double-crossing, career making and dismantling that goes on in good old Hollywood. To keep everybody from getting confused, the show revolves around about a dozen or so people, all of who revolve around the Courtney Cox character.

I’ve watched the entire first season so far, and this has been fascinating TV to watch. The plotting is incredibly ingenious. Every time you think you have something figured out, something different happens…how entertaining is that? The show’s narrator, played by outstanding TV character actor Ian Hart, (Homicide) plays the star photographer for the magazine. He functionally schitzophrenic and he’s hell on wheels when he goes off his meds.

The series itself is about as energetic, albeit soap opera-ish as anything ever put on TV short of 24. It moves at a relentless pace, and not in a frenetic way, as the whole story steadily collapses on the main character. Any more detail than that would be spoiling things and we don’t wanna do that now do we?

This series was canceled after seven episodes of the second season had aired. And I can understand why. This series, although fictional, pointed out just how nasty and evil a place Hollywood can be, and, let’s face it nobody really like their dirty laundry exposed for any length of time, especially on a weekly basis. On the viewer side, I can kinda see how a lot of people could just wear out from watching it. I mean, there’s a lot of nasty stuff going on in this series, not so much physical but, a ton of psychological violence. This can kinda get to you after a while. Not me, of course, I love this stuff. The heavier the better…bring it on.

Anyway, if you see this series show up in the video store or on Showcase or Bravo, now that it’s in syndication, check it out. You’ll be able to tell right away whether it’s your cup of tea or not. If it isn’t, well you can see how hot Courtney Cox still is. And if it is, you’re into for 19 episodes of real nasty fun.

24- REDEMPTION (1.5 SPUDS)

Speaking of nasty stuff on TV, good old Jack Bauer, American’s favourite anti-hero is grunting at us again, in this 2 hours prequel to the sixth season of 24, coming up in January. Here we pick up poor wandering Jack, down in some fictional African country working with an old special forces pal (Robert Carlyle) running a school for orphans. What a softie, eh? The government sponsored sociopath with a heart of gold. The school, as it turns out is a shopping centre for the badass rebels who are in the process of taking over the country and need lots of little kids to do their soldierly dirty work, which, of course, good old Jack is not going to let happen on his watch.

For a 24 prequel, it was actually pretty linear, but it did manage to set up the situation in the US where they have elected their first female president (they’ve already has two African Americans, so that’s old news), and she, of course has to deal with the coup in the African country, the current government of which is being propped up by good old American guns and money.

I was a little disappointed with this as a movie, but quite well informed as a series fan and ready, I assume, to hit the ground running, so to speak, when the actual series start up in Jan.

VOLUME 340

DVDS
WAR INC (1.5 SPUDS)
THE BUCKET LIST (2 SPUDS)
DEATH DEFYING ACTS (2 SPUDS)

TV
THE US ELECTION (2 SPUDS)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

THE US ELECTION ( 2 SPUDS)

The weather is starting to cool down again, after the great Indian Summer we had last week. But that’s OK with me. It’s time. The damn Christmas commercials have cranked up in full force. What’s with these advertisers? Don’t they know we know it’s just 6 weeks till Christmas (4 when you get this). And good luck with trying to get people into the Christmas spirit this year. Dear Santa, please leave a mortgage I can afford under the tree. I blame advertising for a lot of the stuff that’s wrong in the world right now. Not just the kind of advertising that you see in the conventional media. The kind of advertising that brokers do when they want to get you to buy into oil futures and drive the price sky high. The kind of advertising your banks do to gently convince you that you need to own your own home and have equity and property and are willing to bend over backwards to make your mortgage happen…for the first few months and then wham…they hit you with reality. Spud Central is owned outright by the Wife and I and it took a lot of years to make that happen. But one thing we never did during all those years was miss a payment. We were religious about it. It was a matter of honour. And some months it was really tough. Some months we worried a lot. So I can sympathize with the plight of many people out there who, for whatever reason, are finding it hard to make ends meet.

I know we’re not feeling the same pressure here in Canada as our American neighbours.But if things keep going south down there, it’s only a matter of time before we start feeling it too.

It’s gotten so bad in the US that they have done something they seldom do, and might actually find it is a good solution to a lot of what ails that country. They’ve given Barack Obama a clear mandate, a strong majority in both houses, and they have wiped the Evil Asshole Bush right off the map. The most amazing paradox of our time is how governments, who are supposed to be making sure our society runs smoothly, are often the biggest impediment to that process. It makes you wonder if it wasn’t better when we all lived in family tribes and didn’t have so much crap to protect or people to look out for.

This US election is like nothing I have ever seen in politics. It became a complete force of nature, sweeping up everyone, not just in the US, but around the world. It’s the first time in the recent history of the world where a single election has garnered so much attention from just about everywhere. I was watching PBS the other night and they were showing clips from all over the place of people celebrating Obama’s victory. We’re talking China, Indonesia, Japan and even France here. I’ve never seen anything like it.

Call me skeptical or cynical but I never believed a black man would ever be president in my lifetime. But it comes at a great time in history. A time when being a person of colour puts you in the vast majority in the world community. A time when you can use that colour and the clout of your office to affect changes that an idiotic old white guy could never hope to affect.

The United States has allowed themselves to be led by a complete boob, an old school republican who turned a blind eye to just about every crisis that country has faced from 9/11  to Katrina to the Wall Street meltdown. He not only was nowhere to be seen when it came time to solving those problems, he was also a very busy boy creating new problems of his own. Problems none of us even knew we had. And for what? Well besides the general carpetbagging that most Republicans are historically famous for, my theory is that he was simply supporting his own family. You see, his dad, who used to be president and did the same sort of crap as his son, is now one of the world’s biggest weapons suppliers. Do the math…it’s not advanced calculus…it’s just perverted form of pork barrel spending.

I spent the last eight years seesawing back and forth from total disbelief to total disgust at what the leadership of the United States was doing to its own country. And now were seeing the effects of that bad management in just about every important sector of American life. People can’t afford their mortgages, because of unchecked banking practices. They can’t afford health care, because of old school republican thinking.  Their investments are in the crapper because of Wall Street greed. Their auto industry is in deep doo doo and looking for a bail out because nobody wants to buy the gas guzzling behemoths they have been making, all because nobody in government gave a shit about the environment. Hundreds of great green business ideas are withering on the vine for the same reason. They are 10 trillion dollars in debt to China, who are just sitting there and waiting for the bottom to fall completely out. They have zero respect as a superpower around the world, cause they can’t win a war to save their asses. My God…has it ever been this hopeless down there. And how long will it take before this trickles north?

So what do we have. A tiny ray of hope named Barack Obama. The world was a lot smaller place when there was anyone who was this well known that wasn’t an athlete, movie star or  capitalist trillionaire.

This dude really has his work cut out for him. And it’s going to be really interesting to see if he can pull it off. It’s also going to be yet another stern test for the American people, to see if they are willing to swallow the bitter pills that are part of the treatment required to fix all the stuff that’s wrong. This is, historically, where it all falls apart. Where the nano second attention span of the people starts to kick in, turning everything into yesterday’s news.

I pray, and so should we all, that this time will be different. That the Amercians who are so pumped, at the moment, will continue to be pumped long enough for Mr Obama to really get the job done.

DVDS

WAR INC  (1.5 SPUDS)

This flick is a sequel of sorts to one of my favourite movies of all time, Grosse Point Blank, in which John Cusack  plays a professional killer who has a contract in his home town at the same time as his high school reunion is happening. This movie is thriller comedy and it’s one the best ever put on film. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for this flick. While it is interesting and has more than its share of humour, its send up of US Imperialism is way over the top, and the characters all lose their grounding, which is the thing that tends to make these kinds of movies work. In this film, Cusak’s hit man has gone international, and has developed a whole bunch of new quirks as a result. For one thing, he carries around a small case full of burn your guts out hot sauces and drinks the stuff straight out of a shot glass. This is to evidently shock him out of the numbness he normally feels. The location is some ‘Stan’ country that has been ravaged by US might and the carpetbaggers have descended to rebuild the infrastructure and strip the country’s treasury in the process. War Inc. looks and feels like it could have been made in the seventies or eighties when it was, for some reason, OK to be over the top.

War Inc isn’t really all that bad. It’s just that it’s an ugly sibling to a real masterpiece and that makes it come off even shoddier by comparison.

THE BUCKET LIST (2 SPUDS)

This flick, starring Morgan Freeman and Jack Nicholson as two geezers dying of various forms of cancer, isn’t anywhere near the comedy it was advertised to be. Sure there is some funny stuff here, but mostly it’s about two guys who are dying and determined (at least one of them), to go out with a bang.  Jack plays a billionaire HMO tycoon and Morgan a working class mechanic who end up sharing the same hospital room, become friends. Then after their treatments are over and their death sentences pronounced, begin to trapse around the world doing all the things they wanted to do but never had time to up till now, hence the title.

There’s a lot of sad irony here. And a lot of really good acting. This story is touching and tweaks your heartstrings in a number of different ways. It’s a little manipulative in that regard. But then any communication that comes at you is manipulative if it’s doing its job.

There’s a certain amount of depressing-ness to this film, as you would expect, but these actors have such nobility that it doesn’t really make you feel sad or depressed. But it does make you think about life and all the unfinished symphonies you have on your own Bucket List.

I don’t really have a long list. I’ve never really sought or have been driven to achieve greatness in an iconic way.  I’ve always believed that we’re here for a good time, not a long time and I am determined to enjoy life as much as I can. Writing this column, evidently, is one of my main sources of joy. I have no idea how many people are reading it. I do know that the people closest to me do, and that’s enough for me. I love writing lyrics, but don’t really care all that much if they get turned into hit songs or not. The joy is in the doing, just as it always has been.

Anyway, you can see that The Bucket List has brought out a little of the philosopher in me. Maybe you should check it out and see what it does for you.

DEATH DEFYING ACTS (2 SPUDS)

This movie was made in Scotland and stars Guy Pierce and  Catherine Zeta-Jones, who are pretty big time A-List people. It’s a little slice of the life of the famous illusionist Harry Houdini. Guy Pierce plays Houdini as a boisterous and slightly manic superstar of his day, who was, for some reason, obsessed with getting into psychic contact with his dearly departed mother. He actually staged a contest where he would pay $10,000 to anyone who could tell him what his mom’s dying words were.

When he blows into Edinburgh, a resourceful con artist (Zeta-Jones) and her daughter glom onto this and con their way into Houdini’s life and, in Catherine’s case, bed.

It all makes for a very entertaining movie for both sexes, since neither Guy Pierce and Catharine Z-J are all that hard to look at. They have some very good chemistry together and that, coupled with an interesting story, great supporting players plus outstanding production values right across the board and you have yourself a very good evening’s entertainment.

Death Defying Acts has a lot of the same qualities of the Illusionist and The Prestige, which are both excellent period pieces as well as great stories.

Anyway. It’s Saturday afternoon. I’m sitting down in the Spud Central screening room watching Dirt…the excellent USA Network series starring Courtney Cox. The Wife is out doing some (early by guy standards) Christmas shopping with the Princess of Pain. I’m thinking about maybe planning for a day at some point in the future when I will head out and just nail it all down all at once. It’s a guy thing. The only trouble is that it only takes a couple of minutes from right about now till the first day back to work after New Years. I really like this time of year, but it just seems to go so damn quick. Doesn’t it?

See you next time.

Volume 339

TV MID SEASON REPORT CARD KNOW

YOUR SPUDS TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

It’s Tuesday morning. I’m waiting to go to a meeting with a new client. I stuck my head out the door to get some idea of what to wear and got what I can officially designate as the first taste of ‘here comes winter. The wind coming up today is likely to knock most of the leaves off the trees. As the Wife took off for work in the Spudmobile, I noticed that raking the leaves just tumbled into the job jar. The weather man is predicting a CM of snow for tomorrow and that means yucky leaf raking, so I’d better get my arse out and do it today.

I don’t really mind the coming of winter. I mean that’s why we live there. The seasonal changes. The fluffy white powder, the spinning tires, the endless shoveling, the soaking wet car mats. The cold north wind. The everpresent ominous gunmetal cloudcover.  Ahhh, it’s a freaking winter wonderland.

On the plus side, winter brings basketball season which is always good thing. That actually starts tonight officially as the NBA Champion Boston Celtics take on the Cleveland Cavaliers. It also means that the NFL season reaches the halfway point and things really start to get interesting. As a handicapper, my picks so far this season have left a little to be desired. Although, as a sports fan, I have been treated to a number of very good games. But the “On Any Given Sunday” rule is in full force this year. (On any given Sunday, any team in the NFL is capable of beating any other team). And that’s a big part of why people watch the NFL in the massive numbers that they do. It may be argued that many other sports work the same way, but it’s never been proven to the extent that it has in the NFL. Also on the plus side, the winter brings to DVD all the big movies that we never bothered with in the summer. And in most cases, all the reasons why we never bothered with them. And later on in the winter, TV brings the ‘second season’ shows, which are usually better than those that launch in the fall. I’m always conflicted about what time of year I prefer. But over the past several years, we’ve found that going out on a hot summer day is a recipe for sinus problems and overheating, whereas going out on a cold winter’s day is just crisp, clean fun.

MID SEASON REPORT CARD FOR PRIME TIME SHOWS

MONDAY

Mondays are traditionally jam packed with stuff that makes you thank Uncle Ted for time shifting so you can PVR all the shows you want to see.

CHUCK (CBS) (2 SPUDS) – Chuck is back for its second season and hopefully doing quite well  in spite of the fact that there sure seems to be a lot of international espionage going on in Pasadena So Cal, where the show is set. But why wouldn’t there be. After all this show is a send up of the whole James Bond concept and a funny one at that. This fish out of water spy show has a lot going for it and packs a tone of stuff into its hour.

TERMINATOR-THE SARAH CONNER CHRONICLES  (2 XL SPUDS) This series is a sequel to the original Terminator movies, that follow the attempts of Sarah Conner to keep her son John alive so he can become leader of the resistance that eventually defeats the machine culture that takes over and enslaves the world. Pretty heady stuff. And great sci-fi, that is kind of like watching a really slow fuse burning down to a really big bomb. The writing and plotting especially are very good, creating an amazing level of suspense every week, as new terminators show up to take young John out before he can achieve his ultimate destiny. There are a number of sub-plots along the way that keep it all interesting including one which explains in a credible way just how the rise of the machine culture came about. This is really good TV.

DRAGONS DEN (CBC) (2 SPUDS) –Four rich business persons intimidate the hell out of a bunch of puissant inventors and occasionally buy into one of the ideas presented to them. Sound likes something that would appeal to Marquis De Sade devotees, but it’s fascinating. You learn a ton about presenting business ideas and taking criticism that’s straight from the horse’s mouth.

THE BIG BANG THEORY (CBS) (2 SPUDS)  – 4 Rocket Scientists and Blonde Bimbo. This is easily on the funniest, cleverest and best performed shows on television, the brainchild of legendary Producer, director, writer, musician etc Chuck Lorre. This is a guy who gets to do pretty much whatever he wants on TV, and, as a consequence, does great things. The great thing about The Big Bang Theory is that it has what my pal Dean Raynor calls a high degree of ‘watchable againable’. In addition to being extremely funny the first time.

TWO AND A HALF MEN (CBS) (2 SPUDS). If you don’t know about this show, crawl back in your  cave and go back to sleep. It’s the highest rated, most Emmyfied show on TV. Another Chuck Lorre special. Nuff said.

HEROES (NBC) (1 SPUD) – It’s probably still popular with the kids that get together and pass the Dutchie while watching, but for those of us who have outgrown the demon weed, it’s just real confusing and not very entertaining, as it seems to have lost the thread that was holding it together and caromed off somewhere into cyberspace.

THE BORDER (CBC) (2 SPUDS)  This is arguably the best contemporary drama the CBC has ever put on TV. It’s about the immigration department and all the internal and international politics and bullshit they have to deal with. This show has amazing energy, great characters and terrific stories. Why the hell it hasn’t been picked up in the US is beyond me. But if this show is pointing the way for dramatic program development in Canada, it’s making me hopeful that there is more out the like this. This show, perhaps more than anything except Intelligence is actually beating the Americans at their own game and as I proud Canadian I’ve just got to blow a big fat raspberry to the south.

BOSTON LEGAL (ABC) (2 SPUDS) – This is one of the best shows on TV, thanks to a fantastic cast including James Spade and Wild Bill Shatner and writer producer/genius David E. Kelley. This show was one of the first to tackle serious issues with humour and actually be two shows in one. I love it. It’s probably my favourite show of all. TUESDAY Not quite Monday, but not too shabby.

THE TUDORS  (CBC) (2 SPUDS) This is a pompous-ass fictionalization of the life of Henry VIII, arguably one of the most notorious kings of merry olde Englande. It’s very well written and exquisitely produced, and though it kinda drags it’s regal butt here and there, it’s pretty entertaining.

HOUSE  (GLOBAL/FOX) (2 SPUDS This is one of the highest rated shows on television and it all comes down to two things. Hugh Lawrie and the scripting of the show. His portrayal of the tortured and physically anguished genius diagnostician is simply in a class of its own on television. The only performance that comes close in James Spader’s Alan Shore on Boston Legal. This is must see TV.

FRINGE (FOX): (2 SPUDS) Spooky fun from Mr JJ Abrams, creator Lost, Alias, What About Brian etc. This is a kind of hopped up and less mysterious version of The X Files, complete with female FBI agent with lots of issues, mad scientist who loves junk food and his enterprising son, who is determined to figure out the mystery of it all. This show is pretty graphic and awfully weird. But you’ve got to hand it to Mr Abrams…the dude knows how to keep your attention.

NCIS (CBS): (2 SPUDS) This show started 3 years ago as a spin-off from the highly successful JAG, but it has more in common with CSI than its parent show. It’s all about the investigation, and it’s just great. It’s also done in a not quite so serious way, that gives the characters a lot more humanity than the tortured souls that inhabit the CSI world.

ELI  STONE (ABC) (2 SPUDS) This light drama, in its second season is about a hardnosed lawyer (Johnny Lee Miller) who starts having visions that keep coming true. Everybody thinks he’s nuts, and then they find out he has a brain aneurism that’s pushing on an area of his brain that could cause these hallucinations, so he has it removed, and finds out, much to his chagrin that he’s still having the visions. While the first season spent a lot of time on the visions and his efforts to deal with them, the second season seems to be more about what this has all meant to his law firm. Greg Berlanti, (Everwood, one of the best family dramas of all time), created this show, so it’s chock full of humanity and a very entertaining.

WEDNESDAY

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE CANADA (CTV) (2 SPUDS) This is a clone of the US show, and is, I am delighted to report, every bit as entertaining. Last night I watched the final 12 contestants compete and I honesty cannot figure out how anyone could say that one dancer was any more or less deserving than another. This is a hell of a thing. These kids are as good as anything out there in the dancing world, legends not withstanding. This show, except for the irritating hostess, (she’s no Cat Deeley) is an absolute joy to watch every week.

CRIMINAL MINDS (CBS): (2 SPUDS) This is dark, nasty serial killer stuff about a special investigative FBI team. It is two or three notches above any other cop show I’ve ever seen. These people deal with the absolute worst criminals you can imagine, and they bear the psychological scars to prove it. This show isn’t for everybody, cause it’s real intense. But it is terrific entertainment nonetheless.

THE MENTALIST (2 SPUDS) This is a mildly interesting copy-type series that’s right in line with the trend of having intuitive eggheads of one kind or another hanging out with real cops or FBI agents, who don’t seem to be able to do their jobs without them. In this one, the very charming Simon Baker plays an FBi advisor, who used to be a mentalist, but who has highly developed powers of observation. It’s all very California and a pleasant way to spend an hour. One thing I noticed is that these FBI people all eat together a lot.

STARTER WIFE (SHOWCASE) (2 SPUDS) This is one of those LA cable series starring Debra Messing as a separated and ostracized from her peer group Hollywierd wife and her small circle of friend. This show is very smart, funny and sometimes mildly depressing when you think about just how crazy life is out there in La La Land.

THURSDAY

LIFE ON MARS (ABC) This is a rip of the weird Brit series of the same name. This one is a lot more atmospheric, but the story line is a little more transpired, as there are probably a lot of BDIs  (Brain Dead Idiots) watching it, cause it’s doing rather well. Essentially it’s a kind of time warp thing. Cop gets hit by a car in 2008, wakes up in 1973, still a cop, still working at the same precinct. This series also has Michael Imperioli and Harvey Kietel in it and they are just great at being seventies characters.

THE ELEVENTH HOUR (CBS) (1.5 SPUDS) I’ve been kind of waffling back and forth on this one. It’s not bad I guess. But again it’s kind of a dumbed down intellectual crime-fighting show, starring yet another Brit with a great American accent. This time it’s Rufus Sewell. He calls himself an FBI Science Guy. And he kinda figures out what really happened whenever there’s a weird crime. Usually the prots are really complex and that’s good. But it tends to drag its ass here and there and that’s not so good. Hence the waffling on my part. But it’s a good looking show and Rufus has some real charisma going on.

FRIDAY

LIFE  (NBC) Another transplanted Brit doing a great American accent, this is a pretty good cop show about a cop who was framed for murder and gets out after about 12 years with with a big fat cash settlement and his old job back. The cop, played by Damian Lewis, eats pretty much nothing but fresh fruit and has an extremely Zen like attitude towards solving crimes, including the old murder case he was framed for.  This is pretty good stuff for a mainstream network.

NUMBERS (CBS) (2 SPUDS) This is a cop show produced by the Scott Brothers Tony and Ridley and it’s great. No Brits here, just good old American Boys. It’s about an FBI Field Supervisor and his brother who is a genius mathematician, who uses all kinds of  formulas and algorhythms to help his brother and his squad solve very complex crimes. This show is always exciting and interesting to watch, mainly because it doesn’t insult your intelligence, so much as it counts on it and helps all us math-mystified spuds get a little better grasp on how high end math is used in the real world.

SATURDAY

Nothing happening here except Hockey Night in Canada and nobody here gives a rat’s ass. You can also pick up re-runs of some of the shows you might have missed during the week.

SUNDAY

Sunday, at Spud Central is pretty much all about the football.

TORCHWOOD (SPACE) (2 SPUDS) This show is over for the season, which means if you look for it you can catch the series right from the top of season 2. It’s essentially about a group of investigators whose job it is to capture alien life forms and gadgetry that make their way through a rift in space that hovers directly over Cardiff Wales. I believe this is where Tom Jones came from and that explains a lot. Anyway, this is very intense sci-fi with a great crew of American and Brit actors. This isn’t you namby-pamby slow moving sci fi either. This show has a breakneck pace and like all good sci-fi shows, it’s full of little life lessons. But mostly it’s about keeping the world safe from an alien invasion.

WHAT ABOUT THE REST?

Well, you can’t watch everything. So I have lets quite a few shows drop off the Spud Central radar screen. The CSI shows. The Law & Order shows. Most of the sit coms. Knight Rider. My Own Worst Enemy. Prison Break. Heroes. Dancing With The Stars. Without A Trace. And of course all the reality shows. There are a couple of other shows that I have never actually seen. The Ghost Whisperer. Don’t know what that’s all about other than the obvious. Dr Who & Smallville. I suppose they’re pretty good, just never got interested enough to check them out.

Well that just about covers it. Hope this gives you a better indication of what’s out there.

Volume 338

DVDS
INDIANA JONES & THE CRYSTAL SKULL THINGIE (1 SPUD)

TV
MY OWN WORST ENEMY ( 1 SPUD)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

THANKSGIVING, OR AT LEAST THE DAY BEFORE

Thanksgiving…I know that in the US, it commemorates the landing of the Pilgrims at Plymouth Rock and just how happy they were to have made it to the new world without all dying of scurvy or dehydration. I guess that’s worth being thankful for. But in Canada, it’s evidently a holdover from the European tradition of celebrating the harvest. No pilgrims involved.

I always think of Thanksgiving in terms of what it means here at Spud Central. First of all, it means moving the summer clothes to the back of the closet and moving the winter duds up. It means putting the rubber floor mats in the car. It means moving the Spud Central lawnmower into the basement to make room for the snowblower. It means that basketball season is only a few weeks away, and that football season is starting to fall into a rhythm, so that I can see the winners and losers a little more clearly. It means my first cold of the season, which I haven’t yet had the pleasure of greeting. It means calling the weird skinny guy named Ken to clean the eaves troughs and a whole bunch of other stuff.

But mostly, it means that The Boy, Mel The Fiancee (formerly Mel The Girlfriend), The Princess of Pain, The Wife and I all get together and dive into a gargantuan turkey and all the fixings and the Wife’s inimitable pumpkin pie for dessert. Besides Christmas and the odd barbecue, it’s the only time the whole immediate family is together. In a way it makes me sad that we’re all so busy all the time, but in another way it makes me feel good, like we’re still all one unit and that nobody has decided to “move away”. All families have their issues. But families are also capable of, at least a few times a year, setting all that aside and just sitting down at the table together to celebrate…the harvest.

If you look around the world, you can see that living here in Canada may not always be paradise, but it’s a hell of a lot better than most places. I can’t really remember a time when I haven’t felt very fortunate to be living here. Nobody’s ever tried to impede my progress as a human being here. Nobody’s ever tried to stop me from chasing my dream. Nobody’s ever banged on my door in the middle of the night and invaded my house with guns in their hands and the law on their side. Nobody’s ever told me what I can or can’t believe, read, listen to or watch. Nobody’s ever tried to tear my family apart through conscription or terrorism. Nobody, besides Bobby Huard back in grade school, has ever even tried to pick a fight with me. And I don’t think I’m living in a bubble. I think I’m living in Canada.

I’d say that’s a lot to be thankful for. I hope that wherever you are, you feel the same way…Happy Thanksgiving.

MY OWN WORST ENEMY (1 SPUD)

IN A NUTSHELL: This dude named Edward, who is some sort of spy or assassin for the government, volunteers to have his brain messed with to create this alter ego named Henry. But something goes wrong and the two guys find out about each other. PEDIGREE: It stars Christian Slater, who is really just a character actor but he’s all gung ho and full of piss and vinegar. FEARLESS FORECAST: This show is a mess. Half the time you don’t know which side of his split personality Christian is playing and he doesn’t either. I just kept asking myself why the hell a guy who was already a master spy and assassin would even volunteer to have his head messed with in the first place. It’s a just a lot of high quality production value with very little thought behind it. If it becomes a hit, I’ll fall off the couch. Dead by Christmas.

THE SPORT SPUD SPEAKETH

A YEAR WITHOUT TIGER—LET’S HOPE IT NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN.

They say you never fully appreciate what you’ve got until you lose it. Well this summer, after one of the most heroic US Open victories in the history of golf, we lost El Tigre, Tiger Woods, who immediately thereafter shut it down for the season and underwent surgery to repair his badly messed up left knee.

Anyone who watched the US Open for all 5 days, couldn’t help but wince along with Tiger on every tee shot and every long iron out of the rough he took.  But never once did he consider dropping out.  The man is just obsessed with finishing what he starts. When asked that very question in interviews after the tournament, you could see the puzzlement in his eyes. Guys like Tiger are not built to wimp out, although playing with that level of injury would have made his decision to drop out extremely excusable. But things like that just aren’t part of the way he pays the game or manages his career.

Tiger’s disappearance from the circuit left a mighty big hole at the top and it was obvious that Lefty (Phil Mickelson) and Sergio Garcia would be the most popular choices to jump in and take the reins. What happened instead was that all they managed to show is how they could blow a tournament on Sunday with the best of them. This, of course, opened up opportunities for other golfers like the much hated (at least by the Wife),Vijay Singh, the ever popular Kenny Perry, the fighting Irishman Padrig Harrington, Argentinian Studly Do-Right Camilo Villegas and the big buckled Valley Boy, Anthony Kim.

And that’s just about how the rest of the season went, and as it went along in this unfocused way, with no Tiger to lead the pack, it just became wild and wooly, but mostly, at least to me, uninteresting. Now a lot of people might argue that the loss of a dominant player like Tiger would kind of level out the playing field, and in a way it does, but it also flattens the interest of the fans, the majority of whom are secretly there to watch Tiger kick everybody’s ass.

This is a real danger to the sport. Because it’s a well known fact that TV ratings and attendance for tournaments drop dramatically when Tiger’s not in the game. And that’s really too bad because in August and September Golf could really own the sports airways.

All this is by way of wishing Tiger a quick and thorough recovery. If a game ever needed one guy to make it work, it’s pro golf, and Tiger Woods is da man.

INDIANA JONES AND THE SECTRE OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL

OK, Harrison Ford is an old guy now. It’s been 20 years since he cracked his whip in what was arguably one of the best action adventure feature series of all time. But for some reason, the creators Steve Spielberg and George Lucas couldn’t leave well enough alone. This latest Indiana Jones adventure kinda reminded me of Michael Jordan coming back to play basketball after he had retired as a hall of fame legend.It was cool to see him for sure, but after a few minutes you realized that he was just too old to be capable of playing at his former level (absolutely great), and that was uncool.

In this movie, Indie is searching for this Crystal Skull and that’s supposed to lead him to the long lost city of el Dorado, and a bunch of other stuff along the way. All the while he’s being chased by a troop of Commie Russians (hey it’s 1957), led by Kate Blanchett, who are trying to kill him and follow him at the same time and that was confusing. Anyway, he gets re-united with Karen Allen, his old squeeze, and her son, a fifties greaseball, played by Shai LeBoeuf, (weird name) etc etc.

The action here is ultra large scale. The effects are amazing. The story is kind of cool. But this movie just doesn’t cut it because the characters are all so secondary to everything that’s going on that you hardly give a shit about them. So now you’re not so much watching a movie as you are watching the Industrial Light & Magic 2008 Demo reel. And that gets old pretty fast.

The thing about the original movies was that the characters were all so great.This was something that nobody of that generation had seen before. I guess they were, with this new effort, trying to introduce it to a new generation, but with the proliferation of the classic original series that’s a daunting task. You’d have to coax all the cave dwellers out of their caves and Mennonites out of their log cabins, cause these are probably the only groups that haven’t seen the Indiana Jones movies. In spite of that, it still did more than $700 million world wide, just in theatrical sales alone.

Just goes to show you the kind of income big names can generate, even for a film that was OK, but nowhere near great.

SPUDITORIAL – WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO HEROES?

The first season of Heroes, the NBC prime time sci-fi drama series, started with kinds of a whimper. But it was like a long fuse burning slowly, as bit by bit all the main players and the fascinating plot line was revealed. I loved the concept of an artist painting the future and a scientist trying to figure out where all these mutants with their special powers were coming from. I liked that it was a little hard to tell the good guys from the bad guys and it was definitely must see TV.

Then something happened. It may have had to do with the shows its ever increasing popularity, but at the end of the second season, it kind of exploded into a complete mish-mosh of stuff that just left you shaking your head and wondering if the monster that creator Tim Kring had created had actually gotten away from him, mutinied and taken over the ship shooting off subplots in all directions at the same time, making the show virtually impossible to follow. This, in the reviewing business, is called forsaking your audience, none of who are the intellectual equal to the strange goings on that are being displayed here.

And this season, if anything, the situation has gotten worse, even more chaotic. The Wife gave up on it right after episode 1. I hung in for a couple more but now it’s just so confusing that it’s all becoming boring as batshit. Everything that gave the show its appeal and a good deal of its focus is gone. And I’m thinking that there’s this bunch of stoned out writers in Hollywood, getting paid an obscene amount of money to write this stuff, and through the cocaine fog of pressure to perform they have all intellectually imploded.

I get the ‘order out of chaos’ principle on which this show motors along. But what good is all that if by the time you get through all the chaos, you have lost your audience? Sometimes, and many conversations with Caruso confirm this, the creators of TV shows and movies get so wrapped up in their ‘art”, that they completely forget that they are creating their art for human consumption, and the timeless adage,
“if there ain’t no audience, there ain’t no show’, always applies.

I hope, for the sake of Tim Kring’s career, that he gets this show back on track, because I don’t wish a ruined reputation on anyone. But the other side of that coin is that I new, officially, no longer care. Monday night is jammed with great TV entertainment, so for me it’s just on less thing to worry about PVRing.

Volume 337

DVDS
IRON MAN  (2 XL Spuds)

TV
Knight Rider (DemoteD To 1.5 Spuds)
LIFE ON MARS (2 Spuds)
THE ELEVENTH HOUR (1.5 SPUDS)
THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE (No Spud 4u)
LIFE (2 Spuds)
EASY MONEY  (2 Spuds)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

I got on the Spudcycle to ride downtown for a client lunch today. For the first time in nearly 6 months, I was wearing clothing that actually covered up most of my body and I was still a little chilly.  After a long summer of postponements and deferrals things are finally starting to get back on track. I am officially booked up the wazoo.

And that makes me happy. My old friend Denis Kane, who may or may not still be receiving this column used to say there were only two states of being for the entrepreneur. The state of worry over cash flow and the state of worry over time management, and that your work life would consist of a constant and irregular fluctuation between these two poles. I used to worry a lot when things were slow. But over the past few years, I have learned to accept that state of being as part of the natural, albeit irregular, rhythm of my working life. I no longer sweat through those periods, but instead work on the things that I don’t have time to work on when I am busy…like now. I spiff up my presentation materials, update my portfolio, scan old samples for posterity, paint the office, do my customary emailing to agencies and designcos who I don’t do much work for, but don’t want to lose touch with either, cause you never know. In short, I do a lot of spring cleaning in the summer.

One afternoon, I went over to John Wild’s place for tea and he was telling me that he uses his downtime to basically improve the value of his houses (he has two). He’s mastered the art of plumbing, carpentry and just about every other kind of handyman function you can imagine. He has skills. John is also interested in the market and pays a lot of attention to where his money is parked at any given time. I’ve known John since grade thirteen at Hillcrest High School in Ottawa. I sat beside him in home room and the very first thing he asked me is where I got my pants. I told him, AM&As in Buffalo and that started a conversation that led to a friendship that his endured on and off for nearly forty years. After I dropped out of college, I shared an apartment with John downtown, when he was starting his career in photography. John has a great career as a photographer. He’s made some of the best advertising images I have ever seen. I have been in some of John’s photo shoots (when I was a young wharthog) and have used him probably more than any other photographer in town for the stuff that I do. They say you can count your real friends on the fingers of one hand. I only have a few, but John is one of them for sure.

IRON MAN (2 XL SPUDS)
OK, this is the quintessential action adventure movie. It’s one of the best ever made and a lot of it has to do with the casting of Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Tony Stark. Downey is one of the best movie actors on the planet, because no matter what he does, there’s something about him that makes him just so damn believable. Granted this is a big budget-comic-book-munch popcorn-till-you’re-stuffed movie and so you expect it to look great. But Downey’s believability and vulnerability takes this genre up over a bar that’s at least a foot higher than anything that’s been done before. The other amazing thing about this film is that it was directed by Jon Favreau, who is much better known for borderline screwball comedies starring his buddy Vince Vaughn, than he is dealing with the high end CGI and high tech gizmology that was on display here. But the dude pulled it off in spades and now has a whole new wrinkle to his rep.

Iron Man was perfectly paced and plotted and beautifully set up for the sequel or series of sequels to come. But that did not, in any way, detract from the power and thrust of the original.

While it did not do as well as Spiderman in its box office grosses, things, as Bob Dylan says, have changed. Movie box office is down about 20% overall. But I don’t really care about all that stuff. What I do care about is that from the minute I started watching this movie until the very end, I was right there with it, amazed and enthralled and severely and sincerely entertained and you will be too. That’s a guarantee. If you don’t love this film, you are seriously brain damaged, and should seek professional help immediately.

THE VICE PRESIDENTIAL DEBATE (NO SPUD 4U)
This was about as big a yawn as the presidential debate. Sarah Palin, who everybody, including me, expected to crash and burn, did not. But she had these bangs falling over her eye and one of them was causing her to blink all the time and all I could things was “Why the hell doesn’t she just push that damn hair out of the way because its distracting everybody from what she’s saying. Are Republicans really that dumb?” As it got worse I started to think that maybe she’s an idiot for not nudging that hair out of the way. Then, when she finally did push the hair out of the way and I started paying attention to what she was saying, I soon realized I was missing the distraction of the hair that was making her blink because, like all the politicians in this year’s race, she really has nothing to say. She did say she was a Maverick, however, like her buddy John McCain. I wonder if anybody ever showed Sarah Palin that footage with John McCain staring at her ass while she was making some speech. Hopefully not. Joe Byden seemed a little put up with the whole idea of having to debate with somebody from Alaska, so he was all patronizing and pissed off. If you watched the CNN broadcast of the debate, they have all this stuff going on that tells you was political journalists thought about who was winning or losing the debate. They also has a room full of schlubs sitting around in Columbus Ohio, with gizmos that were designed to show you just how they were reacting to what was going on, but I couldn’t figure that shit out to save my soul. And I sure don’t give a damn about what political journalists think. Journalists have become altogether too opinionated. They are supposed to be reporting the news, not trying to make it.

Anyway this debate was a whole lot of sound and fury (not so much), signifying nothing but that everybody knew how to answer questions without really answering them. Gee, do you think these people might have a future in politics?

I started off paying attention to this political race because of Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton. But ever since Hilary got knocked out of the picture, things have gone downhill pretty fast. I can’t see how many Americans could muster up the energy to
keep on caring after these yawnfests. The bottom line…I miss Bill Clinton.

KNIGHT RIDER UPDATE—
DON’T JUDGE A BOOK BY ITS COVER (DEMOTED TO 1.5 SPUDS)
Here’s a classic example of me getting seduced by a great pilot. The first two hours of Knight Rider were terrifically entertaining. Lots of technology, life and death stuff and character back stories. But that was then and this is now, and poor old Knight Rider wasted absolutely no time into falling back into a lot of bad TV habits. Namely cardboard villains, buxom babes in bikinis and plotting so stupid it makes you want to cry. The saddest thing of all is that if you watch shows like Fringe and NCIS, you see that they are working really hard to keep their edge and, in the process, keep us tuning in and entertained.  I can’t begin to tell you how disappointed I am. But who knew? Anyway, Knight Rider falls to 1.5 Spuds, pending on more viewing. If it’s as clichéd and superficial as this episode was, it falls right down to the dreaded take it or leave it.

LIFE (2 SPUDS)
After being cut off at the knees by the writer’s strike, Life is back.This is a quirky but very interesting police drama about an LA detective, Charlie Crews, (Damian Lewis) who gets wrongly accused of killing a family and is released after 12 years in the slam with 50,000,000 clams and his old job back. There is also a great ongoing subplot about Charlie’s obsession with finding out who actually did kill this family. So there’s actually two shows going on at once.

This is a fabulous series, and I’m not just saying that based on the pilot.We saw six episodes last season before it was shut down and fell in love with it. There is a lightness and fascination that certain actors bring to a part. A couple of them are Brits like Mr Lewis here and Hugh Lawrie (House). Their talent and magnetism elevates the show without making it seem top heavy and star driven.

Charlie’s character is true to the title in that Life for him means a whole new lease on it. He eats nothing but fresh fruit, has a zen-like attitude towards life and a finely tuned cop intuition. This all makes for entertaining as hell viewing each week and makes life one of big contenders for the Big Kahuna award next spring.

EASY MONEY  (2 SPUDS)

IN A NUTSHELL: This family, in what looks to be Pheonix, runs a company called Pre$tige Loans, charging 25% interest per week and making a fortune off the misfortunes of other people.
PEDIGREE: Apparently some of the folks that had something to do with the Northern Exposure have something to do with this show. All that means nothing if the show is crappy and this show isn’t. The family is all pretty redneck, but the pilot episode I saw had some real intelligence to it and I look forward to following this show for as long as it lasts. Yeah I know…I said that about Knight Rider too. But I have a much better feeling about this show, because it relies on characters, not CGI effects.
FEARLESS FORECAST: Every show needs a good time slot. This show is currently running at 9:00 on Sunday night, up against Sunday night football and probably 24 when it kicks in November. I pray for it. But it just might be good enough to stay alive somewhere in US Cable land.

THE ELEVENTH HOUR (1.5 SPUDS)

IN A NUTSHELL: Rufus Sewell, another Brit plays some sort of big time scientist who is working for the FBI. He has an uber FBI babe partner who is supposed to keep him from getting killed as he uncovers the truth about crimes that normal FBI agents are evidently too harebrained to be able to handle.
PEDIGREE: This was adapted from a Brit series starring Patrick Stewart. That’s about all I could find out. FEARLESS FORECAST: In one of the reviews I read of the pilot somebody referred to it as ‘Fringe for Dummies’, and that’s a really good description. It was a bit plodding, like most shows that are about weird stuff. It seemed like it was trying to be an updated X-Files with a little CSI thrown in for good measure. In short, it felt like a show created by a focus group from Sandusky Ohio, who wanted something interesting but didn’t want to think too much. So what happens when you try to please the yahoos from Sandusky is that you completely alienate the people with more than a couple of brain cells to rub together. Maybe this show will get better, who knows? It did have a nice, rich, dark, brooding quality about it, like a lot of those movies you see that are about the devil coming back to earth to claim his throne. It also have the advantage of being on Thursday night and not up against anything special. But overall, I don’t think this show will make it till Xmas.

LIFE ON MARS (2 SPUDS)
IN A NUTSHELL: This cop named Sam Tyler, from the present is knocked back 35 years in time, and knows where he came from.
PEDIGREE: Like The Eleventh Hour, this show was also adapted from a Brit Series, which I tried watching but didn’t like very much.
FEARLESS FORECAST: This show has a terrific cast featuring Jason O’Mara, Gretchen Mol, Harvey Keitel and Michael Imperioli (The Sopranos). It’s got a fabulous look, and it feels a lot less like science fiction that I thought it would. Obviously the first episode has a lot of work to do, establishing the stories in two different eras and introducing a pretty big cast. I was prepared not to like this, because I wasn’t all that crazy about the British series, but I was pleasantly surprised. I hope this is a hit, ‘cause it’s good stuff. The best part of is that there’s a story line that bridges these two times, and it should be interesting to see how it plays out.  Sadly though, shows like this don’t have a great track record with the CGI and ultra clever script addicted American audiences. But stranger things have happened.

That’s all I got for this issue. See have a great Thanksgiving. I’m personally giving thanks that I live here in Canada where the effects of the shit storm created by Wall Street greed won’t have quite the impact it will elsewhere. I hope.

Volume 336

DVDS
THEN SHE FOUND ME (1.5 SPUDS)
MEET BILL (1 SPUDS)

TV
KNIGHT RIDER (2 Spuds)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

Ahhh. Now this is my time of year. The days are sunny but cool. The nights are breezy and even cooler. You can feel the seasons change. The baseball pennant races are heating up. The US is getting ready for yet another shellacking in the Ryder Cup which starts this week.  The NFL is in full swing and so far it looks like it going to be one hell of a season. Even business is coming out of its summer doldrums and starting to warm up. Life is good. Riding the Spudcycle down to ye olde movie shoppe is more a pleasure than a sweaty workout.  Now all that has to happen is the arrival of some decent movies. And I’m afraid there will be time to watch them, this season as last year’s writer’s strike has really retarded the development of a number of the new series for this season. Oh well, there’s always the Discovery Channel and National Geographic. Lots of good stuff on there, especially if you want to get really familiar with the world of big time construction projects. And I think I’m busy when I have a couple of web sites to do.

The new season on network television was severely impacted by the writer’s strike earlier this year, so a lot of the shows that were normally scheduled to appear in the fall, and relieve us TV viewers of the interminable boredom of late summer viewing, will be trickling in this year, instead of launching in a big bunch.

That is, believe it or not, a good thing because even though I’m PVR’d up the wazoo, some nights, especially Monday and Tuesday are packed with great returning show and new ones. What I usually do is watch the favourites and record the newbies, just in case they really don’t live up to their hype. Especially the advance reviews of anyone working for media who depend on the networks for advertising revenue. Because as shocking as this may seem, they will actually bullshit you about the quality of the programs they are reviewing just to keep their advertisers happy. What a world, eh?

So far only a couple of new shows have popped up on the horizon. With a couple more scheduled each week from here on out till November.

KNIGHT RIDER (2 SPUDS)

PEDIGREE: Dave Hasselhoff has been famous for a long time. But he got his start more than 25 years back on a series called Knight Rider which was about an advanced automobile with a brain and more gizmos than a James Bond Aston Martin. The Hoff’s Michael Knight was one of the coolest characters on TV back then and he instantly became pretty much of a TV idol. This season, Knight Rider’s original producer Glenn Larson has brought the show back in collaboration with Gary Scott Thompson (Las Vegas), so you can be sure that this series, if nothing else will be slick and exciting.
IN A NUTSHELL: This scientist has developed a new version of the famous Kitt car (voiced by Val Kilmer). But the (as yet to be identified) bad guys are doing their best to steal it. In the meantime the mantle of driver has been passed from the Hoff to the offspring of the Hoff, Justin Bruening, who will probably elevate himself to the same Hoff-Idol status, but hopefully won’t spend the latter part of his career judging cheesy talent shows. The show has a solid cast, including Deana Russo, who is one of the best looking TV babes out there, along with Evangeline Lilly and a few others.
FEARLESS FORECAST: TV needs shows like this that are pure escapist. That’s why a show like Chuck did so well last season. The 2 hour pilot was a lot of fun with great chase scenes and even a little character development thrown in for good measure. I’ll be a fan for as long as it lasts and if they play their cards right, they could last a long time.

SPUDITORIAL — DEADCOMS ARE STILL ALIVE AND WELL

Television is a strange monster in the corner of our living rooms, bedrooms, family rooms, dens and kitchens. The people who run television have always believed that you can get a certain number of people to watch just about anything. And that may be true, but what they can’t get us to do is to keep coming back to watch crap over and over again. If they could do that, their job would be dead easy. And don’t think for a minute that they wouldn’t paper the airways from end to end with it. I mean, quality, like anything else, costs money. And there’s no guarantee that even a quality show will succeed. I mean look at all the great shows that have not been able to find an audience over the years. Men in Trees, most recently, Byrds of Paradise,Heist, Murder One the list is endless.

But hey, there’s no use crying over spilt milk, right? Well maybe there is. Because I think there’s a whole lot more at play here. Most of the crappy shows that make it to TV in the first place aren’t always there because the executives who green light the development of these shows are idiots, although that is an arguable point. Most of the shows are there because somebody owes somebody a favour. It happens in every business. In my business, at any given time, I owe someone or am owed by someone at least a dozen favours. Same in the TV business. Unfortunately for the TV business is that the results of these favours turn into TV shows that some of us end up watching and shaking our heads over, wondering how they could put crap on the air that’s that bad.

This question, at least for me, arises most when I watch a new sitcom. I caught a couple of them this week and I have to say that these were both pretty awful.

The first one was called Do Not Disturb, and it was set in a ritzy New York Hotel. It stars Jerry O’Connell (Scent of a Woman) and a bunch of other people I’d never really seen before. It was simply abysmal. It had the energy level of a two-toed sloth on a hot afternoon. But most of all, it just wasn’t funny. However, you might have thought differently if you were a brain dead idiot, conditioned to laughing when the canned laughter kicked in. But you might soon find yourself going crazy wondering just what the hell you were laughing at. This show was so bad that I think the favour called in to get it on the air may have bordered on blackmail.

The second show in our little excursion to hell is called Worst Week. This show didn’t have any laughs either, canned or otherwise. By reason of the title you could assume that this was going to be a comedy of errors. And it is…about a guy and a girl who are engaged, but she is pregnant, and they are arduously making their way to informing the girl’s parents. The trouble with these kinds of shows (ie comedies with no laugh track) is that even the brain dead aren’t quite sure where to laugh and when that happens the only other options you have are switching it off or going to sleep. Take your pick.

There have been a lot of shows that have tried to be comedies without laugh tracks, and, in my opinion, the only two that have ever really succeeded are Sports Night and Sex In The City. But that’s because they weren’t trying to be comedies. They were just trying to tell a story in the best way they knew how.

But I’ll tell you. I will take an unassisted half hour that makes me chuckle without insulting my intelligence over a dumbed-down laugh-track assisted piece of crap any day of the week.

I can remember a time when there were at least half a dozen good sitcoms on every week. Frasier, Cheers, Home Improvement, Taxi, Sienfeld. There was actually a choice. Now all we have is Two and a Half Men and The Big Bang Theory. After that it’s just a dog’s breakfast.

DVDS

THEN SHE FOUND ME

This is the directorial debut of actress Helen Hunt, who I have always thought of as a pretty good actress…as a director, not so much. First of all, she needs to know that appearing on camera without the benefit of make-up of any kind or decent lighting is something she, or any other actress for that matter, should never do. I hate to say this but she looked downright hideous in some of the early scenes of the film. Also
this script was all about Jewish people in New York and it was kind of dopey and uneven.  This flick also stars Matthew Broderick, Bette Midler and Colin Firth and everybody does a good job with the material. But the movie had the look of a $1.98 Made for TV flick and that made it kinds of hard to watch.

I think Helen Hunt may have some talent as a director, but I feel like I just contributed 6 bucks to subsidize her learning curve and that kinda pisses me off.

MEET BILL

This is some sort of indie flick starring Aaron Eckhart and Jessica Alba, and is probably even dopier than the Helen Hunt flick. In it Aaron plays this whipped arsehole who decides to take his life into his own hands and stop being whipped. This log line for this movie is ‘a comedy about someone you know.’
Poor pitiful me…I guess I just don’t know any assholes on this magnitude. In spite of being pretty dopey and not really going anywhere, it was much better photographed than the Helen Hunt flick.

I really have to stop taking chances on these weird little movies. There’s something wrong with my hunch playing mechanism these days. It’s been a long time since I brought home a good flick on video.

Volume 335

SEEN AND NOTED

DVDS
SMART PEOPLE (1.5 SPUDS)
21 (2 SPUDS)

TV
John From Cincinatti (2XL Spuds)
The Democratic National Convention (2 Spuds)
The Republican National Convention (1 Spud)
Fringe (2 Spuds)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

Wow…it’s coming up on Labour Day weekend and I, for one, am okay with that. It’s been a long, muggy, rainy summer, the kind of weather that saps your energy and makes it hard to sleep at night. I think that as Canadians were more used to cool, cold and even frigid weather. This hot, muggy crap does not suit us. I have come to despise the white noise given off by fans and air conditioners, taking two or three showers a day just to rinse of that yucky layer of  whatever is left on your body when the perspiration dries out. It’s only in the past few days that the evenings have started to cool off and our tropical summer is dissipating. Good riddance. I look forward to the cooler weather. I can stay up later and write this column, which I am doing. And I can sleep through the night under my comfy Crapco blanket, instead of tossing and turning and trying to decide if I am too warm or not warm enough. Let’s face it, except for the short pants and short sleeve shirts and the odd refreshing DQ Blizzard, summers pretty much suck. (Only my opinion, of course…you are more than welcome to disagree).

JOHN FROM CINCINNATTI  (2 XL SPUDS)

This is a 10 episode series that was masterminded by surfing Champion Kem Nunn and TV genius David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood, Murder 1, Hill Street Blues).

It’s very hard to describe this series from any sort of rational point of view other than to say it’s about a violently dysfunctional family of surfers who live in IB or Imperial Beach California. The series was sort of left open at the end, even though it does come to some conclusions, in the hope of it getting renewed, which didn’t happen. I can sort of see why because it really does straddle that razor’s edge between being completely absurd and a total work of art on film.  It became a victim of the 80/20 rule, meaning that probably only 20% of the people (at most) who saw it, really got what they were trying to achieve and were willing to invest the time to see it through. And even on US Cable, that’s not a big enough mob to give it a second season of life.

Everyone in this series is almost completely insane in their own way, with the exception of the title character, John, who appears out of nowhere and actually ends up directing all the other characters in ways they are not even conscious of, and the youngest character, Shawn, who is a third generation surfing champion like his dad and his grandfather before him.

There is a real magnetism to the way this story unfolds and in spite of the fact that these characters are all damaged nearly beyond repair, we (the Wife and me) found it absolutely fascinating to watch. You really never knew what was going to happen next.

This series reminded me a lot of Twin Peaks. And although it was nowhere near as stylized and surreal, it had the same mystical quality about it. You really got the feeling that there was true genius at work here and you somehow, by watching, were part of it. This is a very hard series to find on DVD.  I got it from the Boy and I have no idea where he got it from. But it was absolutely fascinating.

SMART PEOPLE  (1.5 SPUDS)

This is a low key romantic dramady that has the same sort of feel as Sideways, a movie that got nominated for best picture a few years back, which is something I could never really figure out. It’s about a widowed English professor at a university in scenic Pittsburgh, (Dennis Quaid), who has two really smart kids (the delightful Ellen Page and Ashton Holmes), and a quirky adopted brother (Thomas Hayden Church), who falls in love with a doctor and former student (Sarah Jessica Parker).

So there it is. The whole story, given away by me. That’s because that’s just about all there is to this movie, aside from a bunch of very good low –key performances by everyone involved. This movie is very very slow. It’s interesting and it’s clever, but I’ll be honest with you, it will kind of try your patience.

The standard for movies that take place at colleges was set long ago by flicks like Wonderboys and The Paper Chase. Smart People is not in this class.

FRINGE (2 SPUDS)

IN A NUTSHELL: Fringe is producer JJ Abrams’ latest TV effort and it’s a dandy big budget, high energy sci-fi thriller series that’s as good as anything I have ever seen on TV.  It appears from the pilot to be about an elite investigative group under the wing of Homeland Security, whose job it is to investigate weird stuff that could be seen as a threat to US security. In the pilot, the weird stuff is some goo that kills a bunch of people on a plane. This goo was created by a mad scientist in a lab at Harvard University, who is now, of course, part of the team. The team is led by a great looking Aussie babe named Anna Torv. Anna is really a better looking version of Jennifer Garner (Skeletor) who helped make Alias such a huge success.
PEDIGREE: JJ Abrams is one of the most successful producer/director/writer/music people in Hollywood. He’s done nothing but great work from Felicity to Alias to Lost to What About Brian to Six Degrees. He’s written Mission Impossible III, which actually revised the flagging franchise after John Woo almost destroyed it. He’s produced Cloverfield, a brilliant Sci Fi flick, and he’s directing the upcoming Star Trek Movie. This dude gets around.
FEARLESS FORECAST: If this show gets supported with a good time slot, it will find its audience and turn into a monster hit. It’s terrific present day sci-fi, with tons of energy and a solid cast. My instincts tell me that, in what looks to be a pretty sparse year for new shows of real quality, Fringe should do well. The Wife and I will be there for sure and you should too.

THE DEMOCRATIC NATIONAL CONVENTION (2 SPUDS)

Normally, I don’t give a rat’s ass about politics, but this year’s US election is a very important one. The US, mainly through the moronic behaviour of the Republicans, have gotten their country into a real pickle, under the less than astute leadership of George Bush, who seems to be more interested in feeding the almighty and powerful war machine (which his father owns a big piece of). In another time this would be called a form of carpetbagging. Nowadays in America, it’s just another day at the office for George whose approval rating is actually in the single digits as we speak.

The country needs help. It’s suffering big time. Its people are broke and can’t pay their mortgages. Its dollar is almost funny money. It’s in debt to the Chinese for over a trillion  bucks. It’s only paying token attention to reducing its dependence on foreign oil. And its world standing is so diminished that even the Russians are beginning to thumb their nose at them. It sucks to be an American right about now.

They say people get the government they deserve. But I don’t think anybody deserves George Bush. That dude has screwed the pooch on every major challenge he has faced, from 9/11 to Katrina to the savings and loan debacle that’s creating more homeless people each year than the Great Depression.

What America needs right now is a shot in the arm. They need a hero. Somebody that will pull up their socks and get them back on track. Someone who won’t treat the White House as a fortress of solitude and only go to Congress when he wants more money to fight Vietnam II.

That’s why the Democratic National Convention is so important. It’s a chance for a whole lot of people to see what Barack Obama is really like, and it’s also a chance for the democrats to remind people that when they are in power things are good. When the republicans are in power…not so much. And they get to hammer this message over and over and over again. Because somehow a whole lot of Americans are simply not putting this together in their minds.  Which is weird, because it’s not just a matter of opinion. It’s a matter of reality.

These are the same people who don’t quite get the link between smoking and lung cancer or unprotected sex and sexually transmitted disease. The people who don’t get it fall into two categories. One category is the “Jerry Springer Show Fans”. These people are too dumb to know any better and most of them don’t vote anyway because…that would require having a couple of brain cells to rub together. The second group are the Blue Bloods. These are people who have been Republicans forever, and are relatively unaffected by the changes that have to occur to get America back on track. They are, not coincidentally, the owners of or major investors in all the corporations who would be adversely affected by the realities of change that either have to happen or else. Sadly these two groups, especially the Blue Bloods count for and/or influence a lot of no votes and votes in America.

So I have been following this campaign with rapt interest for quite some time now. And this week marks the culmination, at least for the Democrats. They had their convention at the Pepsi Centre in Denver, and it was a very interesting event. There was no electing going on, because the democrats had already decided that Obama and not Hilary Clinton would get the nomination. So this was a combination love-in and pep rally, in prime time for the benefit of everybody out there who is planning to vote. All the big time Democrats were on hand: Edward Kennedy, Hilary and Bill Clinton, Al Gore and all the rest of the gang, basically doing variations on the same theme–the US can’t afford another four years of George Bush, which the Republican nominee John McCain now quite clearly represents.  In my world (advertising), this is called repositioning the competition. And the Democrats have done a very good job of it (in my opinion).
On the first night of the convention, John McCain appeared on The Tonight Show. Now he seems like a good man, but he’s scary because, he doesn’t seem to really grasp what’s going on here. He sounds very ‘old school’ and he’s old enough to be Obama’s father on top of it all.

Over the past several months, I have seen Barack Obama grow from a slightly unsure of himself-on-the-hustings senator from Illinois to a supremely confident and extremely compelling and charismatic leader, who is capable of talking directly to people – not at them or down to them. He inspires confidence and makes you really believe that he can do whatever the hell he says he’ll do. He has unified the Democratic party after a primary campaign that threatened to split it irreparably. He has done his best to reach out and give his country a message of hope. Now it’s up to the country to get behind it.

The only reason I’m even writing about this at all, beside the fact that it made for some great reality TV viewing, is that sooner or later, any crap that hits the fan in America always seems to find its way to our doorstep. So I’m praying the Americans will have the foresight to start working on their problems before those same issues begin to plague us.

I don’t know if I’m going to watch the Republican convention. I suppose I should. But I’ve pretty much had my fill of Republicans over the past decade. I just kinda wish they would go away, because they really don’t have anything to sell these days that’s worth buying.

POST SCRIPT: On Friday John McCain announced his choice for Vice President. Her name is Sarah Palin. She’s the governor of Alaska. She carries a gun and is currently embroiled in a scandal involving the Alaska Highway patrol. On top of that, her experience level makes Barack Obama look like a seasoned veteran. McCain seems to be doing everything in his power to lose this election. Thank God for that.

THE REPUBLICAN NATIONAL CONVENTION (1 SPUD)

I don’t have a whole hell of a lot to say about this convention. It was boring as batshit. It was full of speakers spouting all kinds of platitudes about how John McCain is a maverick and was going to reform Washington, with able-bodied help from, of all people, the female governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin, (who is about the cutest politician America has ever had).

The first night of the campaign was spent fretting and worrying about Hurricane Gustov as it rolled through New Orleans, and again illustrating the point that building a whole damn city below sea level is just plain dumb.

We watched a lot of CNN, where the gossip mongering talking heads there were all about who Sarah Palin was and her scandal with the state police, trying to get her ex brother-in-law canned because he was mean to her sister, and about her pregnant 17 year old daughter. They were like dogs with a meaty bone and did more that night to undermine the Republicans and elevate Barack Obama to sainthood than anything.

George Bush, the most unpopular president in US history, didn’t even bother the show up, on the pretense of needing to be at the heart of any aid efforts that New Orleans might need, cause he wasn’t gonna make that mistake again and run the risk of ending up in somebody’s gumbo. But according to the talking heads at CNN, this kind of helped McCain distance himself from Bush, which he has been trying desperately to do for like ever.

The biggest event of the convention was Sarah Palin’s speech. She’s a good speaker and  really cute, as I said. But I didn’t hear anything that would make me believe that she was something special, other than being a woman. In fact, I have come to view her selection as patronizing in the extreme, especially when you consider that there were a number of  really good republican candidates like Rudy Guiliani and Mitt Romney, who actually would bring votes to the table. All Sarah Palin brought were political and personal questions.

On the last night, McCain got up and even called himself a maverick (I love it). He did have one ace up his sleeve in that he led the fight that brought about the troop surge in Iraq, which has evidently done a lot of good things in terms of calming down the sectarian violence and home-grown terrorism in that country. It has also allowed them to step up oil production, which, of course is why they are there in the first place.

McCain might be a maverick. But I really don’t see how this dude will be capable of doing all the stuff he talks about. I think that when Obama gets elected, he should ask John McCain to be Secretary of Defense, because that seems to be his real area of expertise.

The overall impression I had of these conventions was that the Democratic Convention was everything that the Republican Convention was not…namely exciting, colourful, loud & proud, hopeful, full of great, and I mean tremendous, speeches and the kind of energy that it takes to move into the last two months of campaigning with both guns blazing.

If you were to judge the outcome of the election by the conventions alone, the Democrats would win in a landslide. Unfortunately we all know that real life doesn’t work that way, and it will probably be a lot closer than that. God help America.

Volume 334 — Olympic Special Edition

TV
THE OLYMPICS (2XL SPUDS)

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

THE OPENING CEREMONIES

Over the past few weeks I have been watching all the news & information shows I can on China and from all that watching one thing is clear…I don’t know squat about China. It seems like everything I see about this amazing country is a real eye opening bit of news. I won’t go into detail about all the stuff I never knew about China other than to say that while they have been keeping a smoggy veil over their country for the past half century or so, they have developed into an economic, and more relevant to the Olympics, sports superpower. The don’t have everything perfected yet, but one thing you can count on is that they will never, ever quit trying to be the biggest, the best, the fastest and the strongest.

So when I sat down to watch the opening ceremonies of the 29th Olympics, I was blown away with the sheer spectacle of it all, but one thing I wasn’t was surprised. I think the Chinese see hosting this Olympics as kind of a ‘coming out’ party for the country. And if these ceremonies are any indication, these people really know how to throw a shindig.

First of all, the venues they created to house the events are all amazing. The opening ceremony was in the track and field events venue called The Bird’s Nest. It was designed as much for showcasing the ceremonies as it was for staging the events.

I won’t go into detail about the opening program itself, other than to say that it was probably the most spectacular thing that’s ever been done in a stadium. Up to now, my standard had been the Pink Floyd Berlin presentation of The Wall, which is, now, sadly a distant second.

This show revolved around some of the stuff China was responsible for creating like gunpowder, paper and moveable type. Bringing that to life in a presentation is a formidable task. But when you have a busy beehive of more than a billion energetic souls, anything is possible.

In my last column I said that this left me with a scary feeling and it did. For while you can sit there in your comfy chair in your bourgeois palace (at least that’s how I think of Spud Central), and marvel at the level of entertainment on display, there is also something else being amply demonstrated and that is the ability of the Chinese people to work collectively to achieve whatever the hell it is they want to achieve. Right now they are working to achieve recognition and turn their country into a kind of ‘controlled capitalist’ state. And frankly that’s only the first step. Because once the world creates a level playing field, which it pretty much already has, it’s only a matter of time and energy before China becomes king of the world. And China has plenty of both time and energy…all you have to do is watch the Olympic ceremonies to see that amply on display. The people who participated in these ceremonies, practiced 8, 10 and 12 hours a day for nearly a year to pull this stuff off.

Do you know any other place on earth where the people are that dedicated, energetic patient and persistent? I sure as hell don’t. And that’s the scary part.

USA VS THE WORLD…NOT SO MUCH

I guess it’s just because we live in the northern suburbs of the USA that we get so much spill over of The Great American Sports Ethic. But in most every major sporting contest it always seems that the horking big USA propaganda machine is always geared up and vividly painting ‘a USA against the world’ struggle. I wonder if it’s the same in some place like Uzbekistan.

Understandably, next to China, the US sends the largest number of gold medal capable athletes to these games and this Olympics is no exception. Our Olympic TV experience consists of flipping around between TSN, CBCHD and NBCHD. I much prefer NBC because they have Bob ‘Sports Boy” Costas who is really witty and urbane, and is not afraid to take a shot a the opposition or even toss out a political question or six to President Georgie Bush, who spent a very uncomfortable segment with Costas on day 3. Bush has been a ubiquitous figure at these Olympics, casually dressed and in all the right places at the right times. In the segment he did with Costas, the Wife was heard to remark that this was the first time in a long time that he (Bush), hadn’t sounded like some sort of a-hole. I proceeded to give the Wife a long-winded opinion as to why that is, but she just rolled her eyes and continued to watch the Beach Volleyball.

One of the things I did notice about the USA vs The World syndrome that usually plagues the televised coverage of these games is that it has been toned down quite a bit during this Olympics. Almost as if the USA is now willing to acknowledge that there are other countries who actually have world-class athletes too. However, they compensate for this by covering only those events in which the USA is expected to do well. They leave the rest of the Olympics for the Canadian stations. So in order to get a well balanced feel for what is going on with the myriad of sports in which the USA is not a big factor, like rowing, weightlifting, boxing, cycling etc, you really do have to jump around a bit.

Granted, the USA does own some of the bigger stories in the early days of the Olympics. Like Michael Phelps, who is out there making genuine Olympic and sports history, the US men’s and women’s gymnasts who are giving the Chinese a real run for their yen, and the track and field stars who should also do very well in the medal department. But with the emergence of China on so many fronts, I can see why the normal high volume of jingoism has been dialed back on the part of the US. Because they really don’t own the show like they used to, and I for one think that’s a good thing for the Olympics and maybe even the world in general.

It’s also interesting to note that as of Day Six, our home and native land of Canada who probably sent more athletes proportional to its population, has not, as yet, copped a single medal of any kind.

AQUAMAN FOREVER

There are a lot of big stories generated by any Olympics, but by far the biggest, maybe even of all time so far, is the story of Michael Phelps, a 23 year old swimmer who has, so far, proven himself to be unbeatable in seven of the eight races he has competed in. In six of those seven he has set new world records, and is, as I write this on Saturday morning, the most gold-decorated Olympian of all time. I’ve seen a lot of stuff on Michael Phelps recently. And why not? He’s the pride and joy of America, along with the petite little gymnasts who won gold and silver in the woman’s all around. The weird thing about Michael Phelps is that he doesn’t really seem to wear his passion on his sleeve like so many athletes, pro and amateur. Instead he’s exactly the kind of aw shucks hero that Americans love. Not too slick, Not dashingly handsome. Even a bit awkward. But when that dude hits the pool, he’s all business, as focused as Tiger Woods, as graceful as Michael Jordan and as fast as a frightened dolphin.

It’s really hard to fathom greatness, especially when you are watching it on TV from 10,000 miles away, but if you take a deep breath, and really relax, you can feel the excitement that guys like Michael Phelps generate when they hit the water.

The beautiful thing about this kind of legend building is that it tends to take a lot of the politics out of the sport. When people cheer for Michael Phelps, they aren’t just cheering for a swimmer or a country. They are cheering for the sport itself and the joy of being present while a part of modern history is being made. Other than 41 year old swimmer Dara Torres, who is making a different kind of history, nothing at the Olympics is this big, not even, I would argue, the men’s 100 metre dash. I’m sure that a new world record will be set by Jamaica’s Usain Bolt, but 100 metre records come and go. What Michael Phelps is doing will probably never be matched again in my lifetime, so I want to make sure I get every second of it burned into my brain. Because, at the end of the day, this is why we watch sports in the first place, to see people do what’s never been done.

It’s Sunday now and last night Michael Phelps won his eighth gold medal along with the rest of his team in the mens’ 400 medley. I feel really honoured to have seen it happen. So, by the way, does the Wife.

THE LONLINESS OF THE LONG DISTANCE RUNNER

Yesterday, we also watched the Women’s marathon, which was won by Romania’s Constantina Tomescu-Dita. The weird things about it was that about half way through the race, Constantina opened up a better than one minute lead marking between herself and a pack of 7 women running behind her. The commentators were going on and on about just how difficult it is to run a marathon, pretty much all by yourself as this woman did and I had to agree, racing or any kind is as much a group sport as it is an individual one. In order to know how you are doing it’s important to have someone close to you that you can either follow or lead. But when you’re running out in front in a race where you can’t actually even see the people running behind you, it becomes kind of like a sensory deprivation tank—I mean, you know you’re out ahead, but you have no idea of just how well you’re doing in the race. So you have to really admire anyone who can manage their race without that critical piece of information as Constantina obviously did. Watching her, which we got to do for the better part of an hour, was completely mesmerizing. You wouldn’t think it would be, but there you go. It’s the Olympics and just about everything that happens there is interesting.

THE GAME THAT MAY HAVE SAVED WOMEN’S SOFTBALL

I was flipping around trying to find out what Olympic sports will be on today when I stumbled upon the last half inning of the Japan Vs USA softball gold medal game. If you follow the Olympics you will know that the US team has won all three gold medals since the acceptance of woman’s softball as an Olympic sport. And because of their extreme dominance the IOC is now threatening to remove it from the Olympics altogether.

But this morning something really strange happened. The USA, who was extremely heavily favoured to win their gold medal contest with Japan, lost 3-1. Now this is something that was never expected to happen. But then that’s why sports is the ultimate reality show. Because at the end of the day, you never really do know what will happen. The miracle value of this win by the Japanese team was made even more miraculous by the fact that in the past 24 hours, Japan has played the US in a 12 inning game, Australia in a 12 inning game and then the US in the gold medal game. All in the heat and steam bath-like humidity of Beijing. Talk about pooped out.

Anyway the heroics of something like this is a big part of why I watch the Olympics in the first place. The second reason is to watch how ‘Sport Boy’ Bob Costas will spin this tonight when he comes on to try and make some sense of it all.

VOODOO ON THE TRACK

The other night we were sitting and watching the 4 x 100 relays and thinking that these might be interesting because both the Americans and Jamaicans were performing very well. But a very strange thing happened. Both the American men and American women’s relay teams were disqualified for bad baton passes in the last pass. Whoa, that’s weird. All I could think of was that somebody down in Jamaica was sticking pins in a doll at just the right time. I know that sounds kind of spooky but at the time it made the most sense. Then, in the post analysis, of which there was a lot, somebody suggested that this sloppiness had to do with the fact that because the American relay squad was made up of individuals who ran a number of separate events, it was all just the function of not having had enough time to practice their handoffs. Yadda Yadda. I just thought it was the spookiest thing I had seen on the track throughout the whole Olympics.

NO BASKETBALL…WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?

Maybe I’m just watching at the wrong times, but I have yet to see a single basketball game, in prime time. My theory is that the churn of events in both prime time broadcasts (CBC & NBC) is immense, because of our ever shortening attention span as a people. About the longest thing you will see is a volleyball game, and they are usually over in less than an hour. Guess the age old paranoia about delivering on the high commercial time charges is at an all time high here, and both networks are working like hell to keep you glued to their coverage. But the simple fact is that reality is completely different. I hung in to watch all the new American commercials and even some of the new Canadian spots for the first few days. But after that it was a one-way trip to flip city. My network brand loyalty is pretty much zero as I’m sure yours is too. I go where the action is…why…mainly because it’s so damn easy to get there.

BASKETBALL…IT WAS WELL WORTH THE WAIT

Last night I taped the whole of the Olympic overnight program, hoping I would get all or part of the final gold medal game between the USA and Spain. Well I did and it was a humdinger. It was pretty much a done deal from the get go that nobody was gonna beat the US “Little Dream Team”. I mean this is the most awesome collection of NBA talent available these days. But I have to tell you, the Spaniards handled themselves extremely well and even though they couldn’t keep up at the end. They gave the US more than its share of fits and starts. But for the viewer (me), that just made it all the more exciting and it spoke volumes about the bigger point…namely that there is world class basketball being played in just about every corner of the world now, especially in Europe. The US won the gold that they deserved and for me the Olympics ended, pretty much the way it began.

FINAL THOUGHTS

We watched a bit of the Closing Ceremonies, but not a lot. I was pretty much Olympiced
out by then.

So here are my observations in a nutshell.

The polluted air of Beijing didn’t seem to have much of an effect on the shorter running events. But the heat
and humidity prevented the longer runs from re-setting any world records.

There were a number of real hot spots. Michael Phelps, Usain Bolt. The US Woman’s Beach volleyball team. Eric Lemaz taking gold in show jumping. The Chinese athletes who took the lion’s share of the gold medals. Our Canadians who copped a few more medals than the Olympics before. And most of all the Chinese people, about a million of them who volunteered to give up a year of their lives to run the show and perform in the opening and closing ceremonies, which will go down in history as the most spectacular events ever staged by a b bunch of human beings.

While we were watching the closing ceremonies, Bob ‘Sport Boy’ Costas mentioned that the estimate overall bill for staging these particular Olympics was something in the neighbour hood of $40 Billion.  And you know what, I saw it all up there on the screen, each night as we sat down to watch. It was truly an amazing feat, and all so that I could sit back in the comfy chair at Spud Central and repeat with astonishingly frequency the two words that sum up my perception of these Olympics best….Holy Shit!

Volume 333

DVDS
Rush Hour 3 (1 Spud)
Played (1 Spud)
Shoot’em Up (2Spuds)
The Host (1 Spud)
The Quiet Earth (2 Spuds)

SPUDITORIAL
MICHELLE WIE –Good Golfer or Bad Joke?

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

The Wife has taken off with my sister for eastern parts known. This has its obvious disadvantages, in that I kinda like having the Wife around and it goes without saying that I miss her dearly.

There are however, a number of things that I can do when she is not here. For example, I can forget to flush the toilet without serious repercussions. I can leave the dishwashing liquid on the counter, even when it’s not being used. I can run the dishwasher when it’s not 100% jam-packed. Complete control of the big TV in the basement. I can leave a used glass or plate in the sink overnight. The Spudmobile 24-7.  None of that pesky bed making. I get to move my office into the basement, where it’s cooler and darker, as I am not a big fan of summer any more. I get to answer the home phone line and drive the telemarketers crazy. It all sounds like a lot of fun but at the end of the day, be glad to get her back.

OK, so this week, I also get to choose the movies at ye olde Video Shoppe without any regard for what the Wife will think of them. Of course I can’t choose films that she might like to see at some point, so that limits the selection to sci-fi, ultra violent bad guys flicks and maybe the odd ‘so stupid that it was actually enjoyable’ flick too…which, not coincidentally, is what I ended up with.

PLAYED (1 SPUD)

This is a Brit Gangster flick with obvious pretensions of being up there with Mona Lisa or Layer Cake. But pretensions are about all it can muster. That and a few good character turns. There are good people in this movie like Gabriel Byre, Val Kilmer and Anthony LaPaglia and they all do a pretty admirable job of being bad-ass. But the real problem here is that nobody bothered to write in a character that anybody would give a shit about. You could tell, pretty much from the beginning, that just about everybody was going to end up dead, and just about everybody does. Having said all that, all I can tell you is that somebody screws up a heist, somebody gets killed and that starts a whole long and arduous chain of retribution, double-crossing and sadistic crap that kind of just spins around and around until it gets dizzy and falls down dead. File it under ‘crap happens, and some of it has Val Kilmer and Gabriel Byrne in it’.

RUSH HOUR 3 ( 1 SPUD)

I’ve seen all three Rush Hour movies, and believe me when I tell you that it exemplifies the law of diminishing sequel return to a T. The first Rush Hour was kinda dumb, but funny. The second was more than kind of dumb and not so funny. This one is superdumb and not even remotely fun, because everything that could be funny gets trumped by the superdumb.

In this movie Jackie Chan plays the bodyguard of the Chinese Ambassador and Chris Tucker plays an LA detective who has been demoted to traffic cop for screwups committed in the last Rush Hour movie. When the Ambassador gets shot by a Triad Assassin, Chris shows up to help Jackie and somehow manages to get permission to do this from his captain, and heads out with Jackie to Paris following the clues. The boys then proceed to trash that city and pretty much order anything they want from room service.

This movie is so full of dumb stuff that you don’t feel so much like an asshole for watching it, but more like someone who happens upon a train wreck in progress. There’s nothing you can do about it, so you just stand there like an idiot while all this really stupid movie stuff happens all around you. After a while you give a fleeting thought to all the brain dead idiots who went to see it at a movie theatre, and then you project that sadness out to the rest of the world somehow, thinking, if this kind of movie can get routinely made in Hollywood, for big bucks, what a sad sorry ass planet we are living on.

SHOOT ‘EM UP (2 SPUDS)

This movie is a hoot. In it Clive Owen plays a guy sitting on a bench who sees a pregnant woman being chased by a bunch of black leather-jacketed gangsters. He goes to the women’s rescue, shooting everyone in sight, cause he’s like ultra capable in the shooting department. The woman then gives birth and then gets killed by another wave of gangsters. Clive takes the baby, kills off that wave of gangsters and brings the baby to a hooker he knows who happens to be lactating and can feed the baby. But the gangsters keep coming and Clive keeps killing them.

This movie was not intended to make any powerful social or political statement. It was just intended to be a movie with a lot of great shooting and exquisitely choreographed movie violence. And on that level it succeeds in spades. It was clever, smart, action-packed dark and everybody in it, especially Clive and his nemesis, played by Paul Giamatti, appear to be having a really good time being bad.

I loved this flick in spite of the fact that a lot of people might think it’s glorifying violence. The violence is so comic book in nature that it’s really hard to be anything but amused by it. By the way, there is a plot here, and it’s pretty much as outrageous as the rest of the movie. But it all works and I can see why A-Listers like Clive Owen and Giametti were attracted to it.

THE HOST (ONE SPUD)

This badly dubbed Korean flick falls under the category of ‘so stupid, it was interesting’. It’s a monster movie about some slimy lizard like creature that mutated into being in some river in Korea and started menacing all the dopey citizen who hang out by this severely polluted body of water. This movie is pretty straightforward in its plotting and the action sequences are terrific. But the characters are way beyond stupid and the dubbing is actually quite insulting to your intelligence. In fact if I hadn’t been so comfortable and tired, I probably would have turned it off after the mutant monster’s first rampage.

But noooo. I’m a glutton for punishment and without the Wife there to tell me just what an idiot I was being for watching this movie all the way through, I deserve all the intellectual punishment this movie so generously handed out.  On the cover box there was a quote from this movie by Roger Ebert, who I generally agree with, that this film was better than Jaws. Sorry Rog, you must have gotten your reviews crossed up, because this movie isn’t better than much of anything.

THE QUIET EARTH (2 SPUDS)

Sooner or later, every country will have a go at the “Last Man On Earth” high concept. In 1985 the Kiwis of New Zealand had their shot. It’s called the Quiet Earth, and it’s a pretty decent little sci fi thriller. Movies like this are kinda neat because everywhere the character goes, you find yourself waiting to have the crap scared out of you in some way or other. This movie is well put together enough to have a lot of scenes like this. The reasons for being the last man on earth are never fully explained or figured out by the character, although
he does figure that it has something to do with a scientific project he was a part of, and not coincidentally, opposed to.

I also admire these movies because they are so difficult to make, because, well you can’t have anything moving in them other than the characters. This is a logistical nightmare for the producers and camera people.

It’s also kinda neat to see all the really primitive computer equipment that the main character has to work with. But, of course, back in 85, that stuff would have been state-of-the-art. Today it looks like pong.

The core message of all these movies is pretty much the same. Be careful what you mess around with as it just may be the thing that bites you in the ass. The Quiet Earth is good vintage sci-fi.

THE SPORT SPUD SPEAKETH

MICHELLE WIE – GOOD GOLFER OR BAD JOKE

A few weeks ago, Michelle Wie was disqualified from a tournament for failing to sign her scorecard. This week, she entered another men’s tournament, and for about the fifth time trying this bold move, failed to qualify. Michelle Wie has never won a significant tournament in her alleged career. Yet next to Annika Sorenstam, who is a genuine woman’s golf legend, Wie is the most recognized female golfer in the world.  And that would be great if she actually did something for the sport. But alas, she does nothing except lose and steal attention from better players. Even if somebody like Adam Sandler tried really hard, he could not invent a character as odd as Michelle Wie. She is to sports what Paris Hilton is to fashion.  She does nothing outstanding or deserving of the status she holds in the sports world, yet there she is, vamping up all the camera time on the first two days of play.

What’s wrong with this picture? There are plenty of great golfers out there on the ladies’ tour. Why does it always have to be about Michelle Wie? There’s nothing more uninteresting in sports than watching a loser get all the attention. But every now and then it happens, and the blame for this sits directly on the shoulders of the media. They somehow glommed on to her when she was a young freak of nature, and they just don’t have the stones to admit that she’s really not a newsmaker any more. So they keep on covering her as if she was and it makes me want to spew.

Lets face it women’s golf, which for those who don’t know, is every bit as exciting as men’s golf, except for the fact that you can’t win million buck plus prizes. But if having Michelle Wie as their hood ornament is believed to be a smart PR move for the LPGA, I’m sorry, ladies, you need to have someone who can actually win a tournament every now and then, and not some California Valley girl who forgets to sign her score card.

Well that’s about it for this issue. I’m heading down to Spud Central to follow the Olympics for the next two weeks, so my next column will be mainly about that. I watched the opening ceremonies last night and the one word that kept bubbling to the surface of my mind was
‘scary’.

Volume 332

BIG SCREEN STUFF
Hellboy II  (2 Spuds)

DVDS
Infernal Affairs (1.5 Spuds)
The Bank Job (2 Spuds)

TV
Californication (2 Spuds)
So You Think You Can Dance (2 XL Spuds)
SPUDITORIAL

KNOW  YOUR SPUDS
TWO XL SPUDS — Absolute Must See
TWO SPUDS — Definitely Worth Checking Out
1.5 SPUDS—Worth Checking Out, But Don’t Expect A Ton
ONE SPUD – Not Worth It, Except For The Hardcore Fan
NO SPUD 4U – Just Plain Sucks

We’re into another heatwave or should I say, humidex wave. They seem to be more frequent this year than ever before. Hot, soupy atmosphere that makes the simple act of breathing feel like a full contact sport. I personally believe that whoever invented the humidex, that algarhythm that lets you know that it feels hotter than it actually is, because of the high level of humidity in the air, should be lined up right alongside the bozo who invented the wind chill and shot. All these inventions do, besides giving the Weather Network people something else to talk about, is make you feel hotter and colder than you actually are. This sucks, and I’m sure it’s all designed to make you buy more stuff to keep yourself cooler in the summer and warmer in the winter. It’s all about getting us to buy stuff, all the time. I mean that’s the nature of our capitalist state. We buy, they sell, and in between everybody works and a few rich people get richer. And don’t get me started on sunblock. There’s another one. The best sunblock I know of is shade. If you don’t want to get skin cancer from the sun, stay in the damn shade. Yeah, you won’t look like George Hamilton or anything, but when you get old, your skin won’t be all crinkled like a badly stitched leather wallet. I don’t get it, people slather on that grease so they can lay out in the sun and not get burnt or tanned. Apart from the fact that they blew 1o bucks on sunscreen, taking the manufacturers word for its efficacy, there’s really no difference between sitting in the sun and sitting in the shade, except maybe that sitting in the shade is more comfortable, easier on your eyes, causes you to sweat less, which only washes away your sunblock, and keeps your overall body temperature closer to where it should be. Duh. Anyway, it’s going to be thirty degrees today, but it’s going to feel more like 40. That is, of course, if you choose to go out and frolic in it. And if you do, well, they’ve got a bunch of words for that sort of behaviour and none of them are flattering.

INFERNAL AFFAIRS (1.5 SPUDS)

The Wife was upstairs reading a cheesy romance novel (by her own admission) and celebrating the early days of her vacation on Saturday night. I was downstairs flipping around when I came across this Chinese flick. Infernal Affairs is the movie upon which was  based The Departed, which was directed by Martin Scorsese.  Both movies are based on the idea of moles in both the police force and criminal organization that its working to shut down.  This is kinda where the comparisons end, because Infernal Affairs  is really more of a low budget thriller, without a lot of action and The Departed is a Martin Scorsese film, and therefore light years ahead of its Chinese source. That’s not to say that I didn’t like Infernal Affairs, because in its own way it was a very good film, albeit a little on the loose side. The trouble is, and please don’t send me a lot of emails on this, but I did have a bit of trouble keeping the characters straight, because a lot of them looked alike to me. By that I mean they were the same age and build, had the same sort of haircuts and all wore the same kind of Hong Kong gangster duds. The cops all wore the same kind of suits and had the same kind of haircuts too. I’m sure nobody in the movie’s primary market had this difficulty and I imagine that some reviewer somewhere in China is saying the same things about the characters in The Departed.

Anyway, if you’re any kind of film buff, you might want to catch this flick. The subtitles aren’t bad and it was interesting to compare the two movies, at least from a plotting perspective. By comparison, I thought that Departed knocked off just the right number of guys, whereas…well that would be telling. Infernal Affairs is around in the foreign film sections of most vid shops, and it’s worth checking out on a slow night.

CALIFORNICATION  (2 XL SPUDS)

This is a Showtime series which stars and is also financed by David Duchovney. In it he plays a novelist/screenwriter named Hank Moody, who is recently separated from his girlfriend with whom he has a bright 13 year old daughter, suffering from writer’s block, coasting on his literary laurels and literally screwing everything that moves. What this series manages to do is function as a complete allegory for everything that Hollywood is about and none of it is very flattering. Dave rumbles and stumbles around in a kind of weird stupor most of the time, but paradoxically, he is the most together character in the whole series—simply because he actually knows what’s wrong with him, something which everybody else in the series seems to be constantly grappling with.

The episodes themselves are only about 28 minutes long, which makes the whole series of 12 just under 6 hours, which is pretty much the average length of a mini series. So that’s kind of odd. But believe it or not, 28 minutes is more than enough time to completely expose another whole chapter of Hank’s weird life. This show reminded me a bit of another great Showtime series called Huff, which starred Hank Azaria. They are nothing alike, but what they do have in common is an innate intelligence and powerful lead characters who are both anti-heroes.

There’s a level of television that is higher than most of the stuff you see on the major networks, where there is freedom to really take sharp aim at your targets, use adult language to depict the way adults talk to each-other, and to pursue themes that wouldn’t necessarily play well out in middle America, where, if you listen to the Neilson people, everyone has a rather large pickle wedged up their ass and a bible on their end table.

I hope that someday HBO, Showtime and the FX Network, among others are licensed to transmit in Canada. I’ll be lined up to get that cable package with bells on.

SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE (2 XL SPUDS)

As I write this, the final 8 dancers have taken to the stage and put on one of the most amazing displays of amateur dancing I have ever seen. You don’t really have to be a big fan of dance to appreciate what’s going on here. This is by far the most entertainment that I have ever seen packed into two hours on TV. These dancers, none of who are over 25 , are being choreographed by some of the world’s best choreographers, learning dance routines in a matter of hours, which gives new meaning to the term ‘breakneck pace’.

I’ve been watching this show for three years now. It really has been a bright light in an otherwise dismal summer of programming, or lack thereof. And during that three years, I have seen the quality of the dancers improve right on pace with the difficulty of the routines they are being asked to perform. What these people do week after week on this show is at least 10 times more difficult than anything they will be asked to do in real life. And every week they step up to the plate and hit it out of the park.

As you watch the show each week you become a little more discerning. Looking for flaws and weakness and usually you see them. But this week, I was completely stumped. These people were all totally amazing and I can only see anyone’s elimination being brought about by something trivial like popularity, or even worse, cultural or racial orientation.

All that being said, if you have not been watching this show regularly on Wednesday night, that’s, quite honestly, your loss and not an insignificant one at that.

HELLBOY II (2 SPUDS)

I first got interested in seeing this flick because of the director, Guillermo del Toro, the Spanish dude who did Pan’s Labyrinth. What I saw in that movie was a vivid imagination tied to a real sense of how to fill a movie screen, and I made a mental note to check out whatever he did next.

And I was glad I did. In spite of the fact that this was a sequel, which I normally don’t like, this movie had a hell of a lot going for it. The only flaw as I saw it was that the Hellboy character, while one of the best in comic-t0-movie history was not the star of this film.The director and all the amazing characters he created was. But that’s OK, because overall, this movie was every bit as powerful and impactful as the original.

In this movie, which is really a fairly tale come to life, an elfin prince who was exiled for being too radical after the elves made peace with the humans, way back in the fairy tale day, shows up wanting to kick some human butt, because of the way the humans have basically screwed everything up. This is not elaborated on but you just have to figure that it’s  some sort of eco statement.

Anyway the villain, the evil elfin prince, is looking for the pieces of a crown that will help him raise something called the Golden Army which is an invincible fighting force that the Trolls created and held over the heads of the humans (kind of a fairy tale atomic bomb). The prince played by Brit character actor and rocker Luke Goss, is a real A-Type personality, but he’s not a maniac or anything…he’s just a warrior with who feels that war is justified.

This is a great story with lots of little subplots and an endless stream of fascinating characters. Since I don’t go to that many movies, I tend to pick carefully. This one is definitely a great pick, on just about every level.

THE BANK JOB (2 SPUDS)

This is an action adventure pic based on a true story that happened in 1970s London. Like most true stories, the plot is extremely complex, but that’s a big part of the joy of watching this movie. What I will tell you is that it is about a bank heist.

What I can tell you is that it’s very well put together, and Jason Straithern, who is usually the strong silent type in all the Hong Kong inspired action flicks he makes, proves that he actually has some acting chops. The babe, and there’s always a babe, is played by Saffron Burrows, who in this film looks like a cross between Lauren Bacall and Ava Gardner. Really hot.

I thought this movie was going to just be another heist flick, but the complexity of it elevates it way above average. This is a great movie for the kind of movie that it is. Well worth a boo.

Well, that’s about all I’ve got for you this time. I’ve been trying to lay pretty low these days
and sleep longer than usual. It’s classically my slow time of year, what with everybody being on vacation and all. Even the Wife has deserted me, taking off with my sister Sharon on a road trip that will take them to New England and the Maritimes. Way too much time in the car for me, but they seem to love it.

On the home front, I just spent the better part of the last three days painting my front porch office, which was mostly brick that had been painted a colour I lovingly refer to as Puke Brown. It’s now a lovely shade of light green and although it’s only 6 feet x 18 feet, it took me nearly 10 hours to put the first coat of paint on the bricks. If you ever have to do this yourself, I have two words for you. Spray it.

SPORTS COMMENT

I just watched the final match of the Roger’s Cup, which Rafael Nadal won in straight sets from some unranked dude named Kiefer, and Ted Rogers was on hand to give him the cup and do a photo op. My comment is, man, that Ted Rogers is one crusty looking dude.